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Why Instant Messaging?
Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 9:55 AM by Jason Barker
Related to my post yesterday, in which I pointed out that I'm now available through AOL's instant messaging service, you might wonder, "Why? Isn't email enough?"
A survey in late 2006 would answer that, to maintain reliable contact with teens and young adults (who are, of course, the core audience for these Bible studies), instant or text messaging is essential. The AP-AOL survey found that almost half of all teens - ages 13-18 - use IM; nearly a third say that they cannot imagine life without it. In addition, nearly 75 percent of teens who use IM prefer instant messaging over sending email. Furthermore, at least half of the teens who use IM (and thus an estimated 25 percent of all teens) send at least 25 text messages per day, and 20 percent send over 100 messages per day. It is therefore clear that my ability to communicate with my core audience will be facilitated by making myself available through an IM service.
You might then wonder, "Why AIM? Why not another service?" I chose AIM over a mobile phone texting service because it does not limit my potential contacts to only those using specific phone service. Furthermore, I chose AIM over other services, not for any ideological reason or preference for AIM's feature set, but solely because it remains the most popular Web-based IM service. I considered using Skype to allow users to contact me - which I've previously written about using - but finally decided against it because: 1) It is essential to keep a transcript of all communications, and I prefer to save space on my hard drive by logging text messages, as opposed to recording audio files of phone conversations; and 2) I've seen little evidence evidence that teens use Skype's chat features.
Finally, I should point out that, while I'm using the AIM service, I am not using the AIM client: I am using the open-source Adium client on my Mac, and in past years when I used the AIM service in Windows I used the open-source Pidgin client (previously called Gaim).
Posted in Miscellaneous